In general, screen scraping is implemented by a software that extracts only necessary data from data displayed on the screen, and is technology that automatically accesses a system, displays data on the screen, and extracts and fetches only necessary data. Because it extracts information from a web site and stores it in another site or database, it is also called web scraping. Because of storing data, it is possible to see at any time when needed, and the stored data may be processed for the purpose of use as comparison analysis data. In particular, it is an essential program for Internet banking and is being actively run by each financial institution, and can be used at any place where users can obtain information by clicking, for example, reward programs such as mileages of hotels, airline companies, rent cars and oil stations, e-mail integration check, news, chat, weather, etc.
The screen scraping technology has been widespread in the United States since the late 1990s, and in Korea, since FINGER INC. established in 2000 first developed this technology and started providing financial services, it is being widely used, primarily, by financial institutions. Currently, a typical example is personal finance management software (PFMS) that enables integration and management of many accounts of financial institutions possessed by a person. There is no need to individually visit each website, providing time and cost savings advantage, but there is concern about invasion of privacy, and a disadvantage is programming modification required every time sites are updated.
The screen scraping technology is largely classified into client side and server side, and is highly useful in account integration services, or personal financial management or business financial management programs, but client side screen scraping technology overwhelmingly predominates over server side due to the domestic security policy requiring the end-to-end policy enforcement.
FIG. 1 is an architecture diagram of a conventional account integration service system using client side screen scraping.
As shown in FIG. 1, when a user 10 accesses web service programs 41 registered in first to nth institutions 40-1 to 40-n through an account integration service program 20 via an Internet network 30, the conventional account integration service system performs a service according to communication security policies of the first to nth institutions 40-1 to 40-n. In this instance, the screen scraping is performed using the account integration service program 20.
As shown in FIG. 1, upon screen scraping of a finance related web service, the conventional account integration service system using client side screen scraping is configured to execute a plurality of screen scraping tasks in a sequential order and receive the results due to service stability or technical limitations. For example, upon scraping to see transaction details of many bank accounts, there is a problem with serious performance degradation.
To solve this problem, technology for parallel screen scraping by a plurality of scraping machines has been developed. However, conventionally, for scraping machines to work in different operating systems, it is necessary to separately develop scraping modules suitable for each operating system to conform to the security policies required by the financial institutions. For example, there is a need to develop each separate scraping modules for Windows operating system based PCs as well as Linux or OS X based computers, or mobile operating systems such as iOS and android, and as the type of users' devices and operating systems becomes varied, the scale and cost of equipment used for development exponentially increase.